Forgive me for skipping ahead to the money shot, but I hate these interminable pick-apart-quote posts.
[quote=“gao_bo_han”]You are right that most of these movements are at present regional. But just for kicks let’s run a little thought experiment. Assume they all succeed (and let’s put aside the Sunni-Shi’a divide for now). Assume that these regional Sharia movements - Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, GSPC in Algeria, JI in Southeast Asia, etc., all succeed. What next? Are they just going to call it quits?
If Islamic history is any guide, then some kind of caliphate will eventually be forged. It is needless to say a massive Islamist superstate stretching from Morocco to the Phillipines is not we unbelievers’ best interest. Agreed?[/quote]
Disagree. Ask fred what he thinks of French and Spanish Catholics getting together way back when. Even assuming that I agreed with all this clash of civilization stuff, which I don’t, would I agree? Would the author of the “clash of civilizations” thesis agree?
[quote=“Samuel Huntington in NPQ”] NPQ | Do you think that the “Islamic civilization” will become increasingly coherent in the future?
Huntington | Certainly we’ve seen movements in that direction. Certainly there are various trans-Islamic political movements, which try to appeal to Muslims in all societies. But I am doubtful that there will be any sort of real coherence of Muslim societies as a single political system run by an elected or non-elected group of leaders.
But I think we can expect leaders of Muslim societies to cooperate with each other on many issues, just as Western societies cooperate with each other. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Muslim, or at least Arab, countries developing some form of organization comparable to the European Union. I don’t think that’s very likely, but it conceivably could happen.[/quote]
Now, I made the same argument for an Arab equivalent of the EU back in grad school, but was convinced otherwise. To my way of thinking, with shared goals, a shared religion, all that oil money, and a model, they ought to have been off to a good start. Not so. As I’ve argued here, their goals are local, diverse, and too often conflicting. The minority sect has made it obvious that shared religion or not, there’s plenty enough difference to kill and die over. Oil money is toxic to governance and capital development; it’s just too easy to stick a pipe in the ground and have money flow into the government’s coffers. An organization like the EU depends, vitally, on tight, binding networks of capital. Oil wealth doesn’t just not create those, it actually corrodes them. Even if the EU provided a transferable model–and arguably, it does not–the Arab societies (to say nothing of the Muslim societies) are far too diverse, divided, socially and politically weak to make it happen.
It isn’t. Nationalism’s taken root. Muslim brotherhood inspires and motivates, but hasn’t proven to amount to much when the chips are down.
